David Pastrnak will be boycotting NHL's “4 Nation Face-Off”

This past weekend at the NHL's annual All-Star festivities, league commissioner Gary Bettman announced that the NHL has an agreement with the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to send the world's best players to both the 2026 and the 2030 Winter Olympics. I hate to jump ahead too much, but with Salt Lake City, Utah looking like the frontrunner for the 2034 Winter Olympics, I'd imagine that the NHL will send its players to that tournament as well.

Next year though, the NHL will be hosting a "4 Nations Face-Off" featuring Canada, USA, Sweden and Finland in place of an NHL All-Star Game. The mini-tournament will be held in both Boston and Montreal, but one of Boston's biggest superstars won't be at the event. In fact, he won't even be watching. Boston Bruins superstar and David Pastrnak is boycotting the event in response to his native Czechia's exclusion.

“It’s a huge disappointment,” Pastrnak said to Bruins insider Conor Ryan yesterday. “I don’t know much I can say. Definitely not happy about it. I understand that it’s a quick turnaround. It’s next year. They probably didn’t have much time to make it a bigger tournament."

“But Czech isn’t there. So it’s always a lot of players left out, so I’m not gonna watch the tournament, to be honest. So just happy that the Olympics got accepted. Yeah, [it] definitely stings a little bit.”

Pastrnak joins the likes of Leon Draisaitl (Germany), Nikita Kucherov (Russia) and Andrei Vasilevsky (Russia) who will also not be welcomed at the NHL's invitational tournament.

Pastrnak though made it clear he's very happy to have the opportunity to represent Czechia in the Olympics for the first time. He, of course, knows all about his country's historic gold medal victory at the Nagano Winter Olympics back in 1998, thanks to a legendary performance from Dominik Hasek.

“I’m so pumped,” Pastrnak said. “I was open about it with you guys this whole time. Obviously very frustrating for me, I missed two of them already. So looking forward to — I’ll be 30, I hope I make the team. But I’m super excited and pumped that the deal got done. It is a couple years away from now, but once the news came I definitely was happy.”